A Corpus-Based Study of the Rate of Changes in Frequency of Syntactic Bigrams in English and Russian

Abstract

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019. The article describes general regularities of frequency dynamics of syntactic bigrams and the method used to analyse them. The work objective is to quantitatively estimate the typical rate of change in frequency of syntactic bigrams in English and Russian. Both changes in frequency of words contained in syntactic bigrams and changes in the co-occurrence of these words influence the total rate of changes in frequency of syntactic bigrams. Their contribution to the total rate of frequency changes was estimated using decomposition of the Kullback-Leibler symmetrized divergence. It was also determined to what extent frequencies of the syntactic bigrams respond to major social events. Data on frequencies of syntactic bigrams from the English and Russian sub-corpora of Google Books Ngram were used as a study material. It was found that the regularities of the syntactic bigram usage are similar in English and Russian. The proposed approach can be used in other fields of science.